This article retraces the roots of the modern comparative history of religions to the sixteenth-century controversy between Catholics and Protestants. By looking at one case study, that of a treatise on cults and devotions by Heinrich Bullinger, one of the most important Swiss Reformers of the early Reformation, it will show how the confrontational method of comparison inherent in the Christian tradition of religious polemics became a flexible means of creating and defending different religious identities. This change allowed both the reinforcement of confessional boundaries between Catholics and Protestants, and, unintentionally, made it possible to place the Christian idea of truth in context. By broadening the perspective to another religious history of the period, the Apologética historia sumaria by Bartolomé de las Casas, the article will identify a common line of thought in sixteenth-century comparative history of religions, which paved the way for the reconsideration of religious phenomena through a careful readaptation of patristic and classical thought.
This chapter furnishes the reader with a vademecum to the volume. It
places uncertainty in the limelight as a key element for understanding
confessional cultures and belief systems, and shows how early modern
Catholicism struggled to find practical strategies for marrying deepseated
uncertainties with its aim of operationalizing an absolute and
revealed truth. Inspired by Michel de Certeau and Bruno Latour, among
others, this introduction argues that a methodological transfer between
science studies, history of knowledge, and religious history offers a toolkit
to reconstruct the credibility of past beliefs. It introduces the volume’s
focus on the myriad of connected laboratories and work floors of early
modern Catholicism, and on the untainted emergence of a universal
truth from such a multifarious activity. This praxeological approach
is illustrated in the subsequent survey of this volume’s sections and
chapters.
Scholarship has come to value the uncertainties haunting early modern knowledge cultures; indeed, the awareness of the fragility and plurality of knowledge is now offered as a key element of "Baroque Science". Yet early modern actors never questioned the possibility of certainty itself; including the notion that truth is out there, universal, and therefore situated at one remove from human manipulations. This book addresses the central question of how early modern actors managed not to succumb to postmodern relativism, amidst uncertainties and blatant disagreements about the nature of God, Man, and the Universe. An international and interdisciplinary team of experts in fields ranging from Astronomy to Business Administration to Theology investigate a number of practices that are central to maintaining and functionalizing the notion of absolute truth, the certainty that could be achieved about it, and of the credibility of a wide plethora of actors in differentiating fields of knowledge.
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